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Augustan   Listen
adjective
Augustan  adj.  
1.
Of or pertaining to Augustus Caesar or to his times.
2.
Of or pertaining to the town of Augsburg.
Augustan age of any national literature, the period of its highest state of purity and refinement; so called because the reign of Augustus Caesar was the golden age of Roman literature. Thus the reign of Louis XIV. (b. 1638) has been called the Augustan age of French literature, and that of Queen Anne (b. 1664) the Augustan age of English literature.
Augustan confession (Eccl. Hist.), or confession of Augsburg, drawn up at Augusta Vindelicorum, or Augsburg, by Luther and Melanchthon, in 1530, contains the principles of the Protestants, and their reasons for separating from the Roman Catholic church.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Augustan" Quotes from Famous Books



... noble barbarism. The country is divided into agricultural colonies, and its only industry is agriculture, its only wealth, land. We want but one more conspicuous change to make it into the England of the Augustan Anglo-Saxon age—the reign of Eadgar—and that one change is the consolidation of the discordant kingdoms under a single loose over-lordship. To understand this final step, we must glance briefly at the dull record of ...
— Early Britain - Anglo-Saxon Britain • Grant Allen

... dedication, the latest offender in this way had been Goldsmith's old colleague on 'The Monthly Review', Dr. James Grainger, author of 'The Sugar Cane', which was published in June, 1764. (Cf. also 'The Bee' for 24th November, 1759, 'An account of the Augustan ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith

... English, without finery or elegance. They had certain popular mannerisms, but none of the conventional figures of speech or rhetorical artifices like personifications, periphrasis, antithesis, and climax so dear to the Augustan heart. They were intent on the story—not on the style—and they just told it and let it go for what it ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers

... the first fifteen years of Augustan Reprint Society, are available in bound units at $14.00 per ...
— Democritus Platonissans • Henry More

... for their light upon men and things fourteen hundred years ago, these Variae of Cassiodorus; and for their own sake, as literary productions, most characteristic, most entertaining. Not quite easy to read, for the Latin is by no means Augustan, but after labour well spent, a delightful revelation of the man and the age. Great is the variety of subjects dealt with or touched upon; from the diplomatic relations between Ravenna and Constantinople, or the alliances of the Amal line with barbaric royalties in Gaul and Africa, to the pensioning ...
— By the Ionian Sea - Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy • George Gissing

... adequately expresses this yearning for the Wild. Approached from this side, the best poetry is tame. I do not know where to find in any literature, ancient or modern, any account which contents me of that Nature with which even I am acquainted. You will perceive that I demand something which no Augustan nor Elizabethan age, which no culture, in short, can give. Mythology comes nearer to it than anything. How much more fertile a Nature, at least, has Grecian mythology its root in than English literature! ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various

... by the death of some actors, and the defection of others, the stock of talents is not likely to be entirely exhausted. Though nothing has for years appeared that has a tendency to fill up the void which succeeded the Augustan age of acting, which ended with the death of Garrick, Barry, and Mossop, still meritorious performers, both male and female, arise, who promise to preserve the stage ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various

... Hadrian, at the entrance of which were two Egyptian obelisks. It was the boast of this emperor, that he found the city of brick and left her of marble. But great and beautiful as Rome was in the Augustan era, enriched not only by his own munificence, but by the palaces and baths which were erected by his ministers and courtiers,—the Pantheon, the Baths of Agrippa, the Gardens of Maecenas,—it was ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord

... god of Praxiteles, then down through the ages of decay to the ugly painting of the Byzantine monk in the Dark Ages. So too the whole history of Rome; the long heave of the wave from Romulus until it becomes crested with the might and beauty of the Augustan age; the sad subsidence from that summit to Goth and Hun. There was architecture which the eyes of the Tarquins saw, there were statues of the great consuls of the Republic, the luxury of the later Empire. ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer

... and colonisation Sidon took the lead. According to some, she was the actual founder of Aradus, which was said to have owed its origin to a body of Sidonian exiles, who there settled themselves.[1423] Not much reliance, however, can be placed on this tradition, which first appears in a writer of the Augustan age. With more confidence we may ascribe to Sidon the foundation of Citium in Cyprus, the colonisation of the islands in the AEgean, and of those Phoenician settlements in North Africa which were anterior to the founding ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson

... orchaesis, which in this dialogue has reference for the most part to the ballet-dancer (pantomimus) of imperial times. On the other hand, Lycinus, in order to establish the antiquity and the universality of an art that for all practical purposes dates only from the Augustan era, and (despite the Greek artists) is Roman in origin, avails himself of the wider meaning of orchaesis to give us the historic and prehistoric associations of dance in Greece and elsewhere; and in such passages it seemed advisable to sacrifice consistency, ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata

... Thomas de Aquinas, and which, although written in rhyme, according to the practice adopted on the degeneration of the pure Latinity, and although the verses have a species of jingling which never met the approbation of the literati of the Augustan age, nevertheless they contain lofty sentiments, and explain in an ingenious manner the dogma of transubstantiation. The following may ...
— Roman Catholicism in Spain • Anonymous

... examiners. It serves the art-critic to talk about Tuscan, Flemish, Pre-Raphaelite, schools of painting. The expressions are handy, and we know more or less what they intend. Just so handily it may serve us to talk about 'Renaissance poets,' 'the Elizabethans,' 'the Augustan age.' But such terms at best cannot be scientific, precise, determinate, as for examples the terms 'inorganic,' 'mammal,' 'univalve,' 'Old Red Sandstone' are scientific, precise, determinate. An animal is either a mammal or it is not: you cannot say as assuredly ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch

... want of strength and enthusiasm; though they may not reflect the traces of a vulgar soul, they display a low and sensuous condition of a noble spirit that has been trampled into the dust by its hard destiny. If, indeed, we call to mind that his regrets are directed to Rome, in the Augustan age, we forgive him the pain he suffers; but even Rome in all its splendor, except it be transfigured by the imagination, is a limited greatness, and therefore a subject unworthy of poetry, which, ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... parts would fit precisely—yes: We should achieve a huge success! You should disdain and I despair With quite the true Augustan air; But ... could I love you more or less,— 'In ...
— Rhymes and Meters - A Practical Manual for Versifiers • Horatio Winslow

... that is, those who have read the most Latin, write the worst; and that distinguishes the Latin of gentleman scholar from that of a pedant. A gentleman has, probably, read no other Latin than that of the Augustan age; and therefore can write no other, whereas the pedant has read much more bad Latin than good, and consequently writes so too. He looks upon the best classical books, as books for school-boys, and consequently below him; but pores over fragments of obscure authors, treasures up ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield

... marbles or Muse Lapidaire, one of the best in Europe. The sepulchral inscriptions form a most interesting series of epitaphs, in many instances most tender and affecting. Indeed, reading these records of the love of kindred among the ancient heathen, from the Augustan age upwards, one would incline to believe that the Romans of that day were already "feeling after" Christianity. In the left corner of the court on entering is the stair which leads up to the Archological Museum and the Picture Gallery, ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black

... is independent of its date or country. The current literary taste varies, we know, at different periods and in different places. There are successive fashions and schools of literature and literary principle—an Attic, an Alexandrian, an Augustan, a Renaissance Italian, an Elizabethan, a Louis Quatorze, a Queen Anne, a nineteenth century Romantic. And yet from each and all of these there will stand out one or two writers, sometimes more, whom we have enthroned in the literary Pantheon, and whose place there among the gods ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker

... more beautiful, or more uncommon lights. If a reader examines Horace's Art of Poetry, he will find but few precepts in it, which he may not meet with in Aristotle, and which were not commonly known by all the poets of the Augustan age. His way of expressing, and applying them, not his invention of them, is what we are chiefly ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber

... told them that the blood of the murdered man cried to heaven. That they might comfort themselves with the assurance that the man of blood would come to judgment. He reminded them of St. Augustan's awful words, 'God hath woollen feet, but iron hands;' and he told them an edifying story of Mempricius, the son of Madan, the fourth king of England, then called Britaine, after Brute, who murdered his brother Manlius, and mark ye this, after twenty years ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu

... yesterday. Of marbles I have found cipollino, pavonazzetto, giallo and rosso antico, but no harder materials such as porphyry or serpentine. This, and the fact that the mosaics are pure white, suggests that the houses here must have dated, at latest, from Augustan times. ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas

... written by those who were poets as well as verse-writers; often by those who are well-known as wits and humourists. It has flourished, naturally, in, periods of tolerance rather than in strenuous times, and has been at its best, therefore, in the Caroline, Augustan, and Victorian ages of our literature. There was not much of it in the Elizabethan days, though some bears the signature of rare Ben Jonson. It came in, in full force, with the mob of gentlemen who wrote with ease—with Suckling, whose 'Prithee, why so pale, ...
— By-ways in Book-land - Short Essays on Literary Subjects • William Davenport Adams

... days; a thousand years, or the days of the latter empire, is but a modern date, and scarcely interests us; and nothing is really venerable of a more recent epoch than the reign of Constantine. And the Egyptian obelisks that stand in several of the piazzas put even the Augustan or Republican antiquities to shame. I remember reading in a New York newspaper an account of one of the public buildings of that city,—a relic of "the olden time," the writer called it; for it was erected in 1825! I am glad I saw the ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... to discover. It is said, that every art is propagated in proportion to the rewards conferred upon it; a position from which a stranger would naturally infer, that literature was now blessed with patronage far transcending the candour or munificence of the Augustan age, that the road to greatness was open to none but authors, and that by writing alone riches and honour ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson

... grave of Saint Peter, a mighty race, now extinct, had piled up buildings which would never be dissolved till the judgment day. Learning followed in the train of Christianity. The poetry and eloquence of the Augustan age was assiduously studied in Mercian and Northumbrian monasteries. The names of Bede and Alcuin were justly celebrated throughout Europe. Such was the state of our country when, in the ninth century, began the last great migration ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... squares. If Piacenza, first founded in north Italy about 183 B.C., and founded again a hundred and fifty years later, is laid out in squares, its coeval neighbour Modena prefers the oblong. If the old Greek city of Naples embodies an extreme type of oblong, so does the later Augustan Carthage (pp. 100, 113). In the historic period, it would seem, no sharp line was drawn, or felt to exist, between the various types of 'insulae'. In the main, the square or squarish-oblong was preferred. Local accidents, such as the convenience of the site ...
— Ancient Town-Planning • F. Haverfield

... also, who performed the same charitable office in "halting iambics," like those of Hipponax, may be supposed to have flourished about this period, although it has been contended that he was a Roman and lived in the Augustan age. However this may be, fabular illustrations began to drop out of fashion soon after this time, and by degrees were so far disallowed, that the man, who would have related such stories, would ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange

... was the period of a very remarkable literary outburst in France, an outburst which has done much to mould French genius of more recent times. The latter part of the century, which has been called the Augustan age of France, the age of Louis XIV, has certainly been but seldom equalled in the number and variety of the writers who adorned it. Yet it owes much of its brilliancy, much of its rapid development, to the training of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various

... absolutely right." Morris, though his published and signed writings were few, and though he pushed to its very furthest the hatred of personal advertisement natural to most English "gentlemen of the press," was a man of the world and of letters in most unusual combination; of a true Augustan taste both in criticism and in composition; of wit and of savoir vivre such as few possess. But, like all men who are good for anything, he had some crazes: and one of them was Macaulay. I own that I do not think all the honours were on T. B. M.'s side in this mellay: but this is not the ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury

... Venusian told In songs that will not die How in Augustan days of old Your love did glorify His life and all his being seemed Thrilled by that rare incense Till, grudging him the dreams he dreamed, The gods ...
— Songs and Other Verse • Eugene Field

... so much so, that even in our church-service we have "our most religious King," used indiscriminately, whoever is King. Nay, they even flatter themselves;—"we have been graciously pleased to grant." No modern flattery, however, is so gross as that of the Augustan age, where the Emperour was deified. "Praesens Divus habebitur Augustus[685]." And as to meanness, (rising into warmth,) how is it mean in a player,—a showman,—a fellow who exhibits himself for a shilling, to ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell

... tail displayed, which was in the narthex in front of the door to the church, and is now in the museum. On the pavement coins were found, most of which belonged to the third and fourth centuries; but there were also one Greek coin of Marcianopolis, two so-called Consular coins, one Augustan, three of the second century, one Ostrogothic of Ravenna, and several Aquileian of 1400. In the eighteenth century sarcophagi were disinterred bearing fourth-century crosses, of an earlier date than Attila, ...
— The Shores of the Adriatic - The Austrian Side, The Kuestenlande, Istria, and Dalmatia • F. Hamilton Jackson

... insignificant poet of the Augustan age, ridiculed by Virgil in his third Eclogue and by Horace in his ...
— An Essay on Criticism • Alexander Pope

... English poetry; but his exercises afforded no proof of his proficiency. In truth, he, as a boy, was quite careless about literary fame. I should suppose that his father, without any regular system, polished his taste, and supplied his memory with anecdotes about our best writers in our Augustan age. The grandfather, you know, lived familiarly with Swift. I have heard of him, as an excellent scholar. His boys in Ireland once performed a Greek play, and when Sir William Jones and I were talking over this event, I determined ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore

... such a picture called "La Notte," the Italian for The Night. The night meant by the title is that on which Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judaea. It was at a time known in history as the Augustan Age, when Rome was the great world-power. Judaea was only an obscure province of the vast Roman Empire, but here was the origin of the influence which was to shape later history. The coming of Jesus brought a new ...
— Correggio - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Painter With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll

... student through early Rome. If he can read Livy, he has a good book; but one of the short English compends, some Goldsmith or Ferguson, should be used, that will place in the cycle the bright stars of Plutarch. The poet Horace is the eye of the Augustan age; Tacitus, the wisest of historians; and Martial will give him Roman manners, and some very bad ones, in the early days of the Empire: but Martial must be read, if read at all, in his own tongue. These will bring him to Gibbon, who will take him in charge, and convey him ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various

... classical Latin was short-lived. The time of its highest elevation is called the Golden Age, of which the early period is marked by the names of Cicero and Csar; the latter (the Augustan period) by the names of Virgil and Horace. There is a fine forward movement in Cicero, who studied the best Greek models; but gradually there came in a taste for curious felicity suggested by the secondary Greek literature. ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle

... directs the movements of humanity. What we witness is a momentous dispensation from the master of men. 'Magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo—with the revolution of centuries there is born to the world a new order of things,' sang the Mantuan poet at the birth of the Augustan age. So to-day we proclaim a new order of things ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead

... in which he makes the city of Ostend speak, after being three years besieged by the Spaniards, is reckoned one of the best pieces of verse since the Augustan age. Public fame gave it at first to Scaliger because he was considered as the greatest poet of that time. The celebrated Peyresc[40] hinted it to that learned man, who made answer, he was too old not to be the aversion of the Virgins of Helicon; and that the verses were ...
— The Life of the Truly Eminent and Learned Hugo Grotius • Jean Levesque de Burigny

... think it reads the more richly for it, and will I hope encourage me to write other things in even a more peaceable and healthy spirit. You must recollect that Psyche was not embodied as a goddess before the time of Apuleius the Platonist, who lived after the Augustan age, and consequently the goddess was never worshipped or sacrificed to with any of the ancient fervour, and perhaps never thought of in the old religion—I am more orthodox than to let a heathen goddess be so neglected.' The ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats

... tragic story, its main themes and protagonists were for all to see. No observer should have failed to notice that the Roman Empire of the fourth and fifth centuries was no longer the Roman Empire of the great Antonine and Augustan age; that it had lost its hold over its territories and its economic cohesion and was menaced by the barbarians who were in the end to overwhelm it. The territory of the Roman Empire had at its height stretched ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power

... Augustan age Perused in Virgil's golden page, The story of the secret won From Proteus by Cyrene's son How the dank sea-god sowed the swain Means to restore his hives again More briefly, how a slaughtered bull Breeds ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling

... national literatures? We all use catch-words, and I shall use them myself later in this chapter, in the attempt to indicate the changes in lyric atmosphere as we pass, for instance, from the Elizabethan to the Jacobean age, or from the "Augustan" to the Romantic epoch in English literature. Is this sensitiveness to the temper of various historic periods merely the possession of a few hundred professional scholars, who have trained themselves, like Walter Pater, to live in some well-chosen moment of the past and to find in their ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry

... work, of whose limits and extent I had yet a very inadequate notion. The Classics, as low as Tacitus, the younger Pliny, and Juvenal, were my old and familiar companions. I insensibly plunged into the ocean of the Augustan history; and in the descending series I investigated, with my pen almost always in my hand, the original records, both Greek and Latin, from Dion Cassius to Ammianus Marcellinus, from the reign of Trajan to the last age of the Western Caesars. The subsidiary rays of medals, ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon

... of this chant and of kindred fragments of the Salian songs, which were regarded even by the philologues of the Augustan age as the oldest documents of their mother-tongue, is related to the Latin of the Twelve Tables somewhat as the language of the Nibelungen is related to the language of Luther; and we may perhaps compare these venerable litanies, as respects both ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen

... I not, by introducing Nero's three greatest crimes so near upon his assassination, merely accelerate the interval between causes and effect? And is not tragic dignity justified in varnishing, with other compost than the dregs of Rome, the exit of the last true Caesar of the Augustan family? For all the rest, good manager, provide me actors, and I am even now uncertain—such is my weakness—whether this skeleton might not at some time be clad with flesh and skin, and a decent Roman toga. I fear it will yet haunt me as a 'Midsummer Night's ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper

... was the Augustan age of Andalusian literature; and besides the numerous learned men whom the fame of his father's and his own liberality, with the security of their rule, had attracted to Spain from other regions of Islam, we find in the pages of Al-Makkari an extensive list of native authors, principally ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLII. Vol. LV. April, 1844 • Various

... (see Vol. I.). There he quoted "The Ballad Singers," and the "Epitaph on an Infant Sleeping"—remarking of Bourne:—"He is 'so Latin,' and yet 'so English' all the while. In diction worthy of the Augustan age, he presents us with no images that are not familiar to his countrymen. His topics are even closelier drawn; they are not so properly English, as Londonish. From the streets, and from the alleys, of his beloved metropolis, ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb

... Great,—we owe it to those chivalrous poets who dared for the first time to be what they were, and to say what they felt, and to whom Faith, Love, and Honor were worthy subjects of poetry, though they lacked the sanction of the Periclean and Augustan ages. ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller

... The Augustan age furnishes numerous examples. A bone snatched from the jaws of a fasting bitch, and a feather from the wing of a night-owl—"ossa ab ore rapta jejunae canis, plumamque nocturnae strigis"—were necessary for Canidia's incantations. And in after-times ...
— Wanderings In South America • Charles Waterton

... Collins's Anglican enemies when they found their orthodoxy thus slyly lumped with the eccentricities of Samuel Butler's "true blew" Presbyterians. It would be hard to live down the associations of those facetious lines which made the Augustan divines, like their ...
— A Discourse Concerning Ridicule and Irony in Writing (1729) • Anthony Collins

... to compare Lucretius, (in such extracts as I then read,) Terence, and above all the chaster poems of Catullus, not only with the Roman poets of the, so called, silver and brazen ages; but with even those of the Augustan aera: and on grounds of plain sense and universal logic to see and assert the superiority of the former in the truth and nativeness both of their thoughts and diction. At the same time that we were studying the Greek tragic poets, ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... been succeeded by the mincing hifalutin of Mrs. Anne Radcliffe and her like. It is at least to Irving's credit that his taste led him back half a century to the comparative simplicity and purity of the prim Augustan style. But it is odd that it should have been for this acquired manner that the world thought it liked him while he lived, and has chiefly ...
— Washington Irving • Henry W. Boynton

... Anne, our island's boast, Victorious sov'reign, dread of Gallia's host; Whose arms by land and sea with fame were crown'd, Whose statesmen grave for wisdom were renown'd, Whose reign with science dignifies the page; Bright noon of genius—great Augustan age. Such was thy Queen, and such th' illustrious time That nurs'd thy muse, and tun'd thy soul to rhyme; Yet wast thou fated sorrow's shaft to bear, Augmenting still this catalogue of care; The gripe of penury thy bosom knew, A gloomy ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron

... disappear in popular books. In the early eighteen hundreds, men and women longed to be blighted in love, to be in lonely revolt against the prosaic well-being of a world of little men. Byron was popular. In the Augustan age of England, classic antiquity was a refuge for the dreaming spirit; in Shakespeare's day, Italy; in the fifteenth century, Arthurian romance. Just at present, and in America, the popularity of a series of novels like "The Beautiful and Damned," "The Wasted Generation," ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby

... in order to give him an agreeable surprise when he comes back, and the knowledge she picks up is money in her pocket, because she can pour out floods of information upon inquiring tourists. When she's kindly told them all about the Romans in general and the Augustan Legion in particular, and the Museum, and William Rufus's Castle; about the Cathedral having been robbed of most of its nave to rebuild the city walls in 1644, and Sir Walter Scott being married to his pretty French bride there (or rather in St. Mary's Church, which was tacked on to ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... the Christian name. Its annals are black with treason, murder, and incest. Even its more respectable members were utterly unfit to be ministers of religion. They were men like Leo the Tenth; men who, with the Latinity of the Augustan age, had acquired its atheistical and scoffing spirit. They regarded those Christian mysteries, of which they were stewards, just as the Augur Cicero and the High Pontiff Caesar regarded the Sibylline books and the pecking of the sacred chickens. ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... been the sense of classical beauty in the so-called classical age of English literature, is a trite consideration of criticism. The treatment of mythology is particularly conclusive on this point. Throughout the 'Augustan' era, mythology was approached as a mere treasure-house of pleasant fancies, artificial decorations, 'motives', whether sumptuous or meretricious. Allusions to Jove and Venus, Mercury, Apollo, or Bacchus, are of course found in every other page of Dryden, Pope, Prior, ...
— Proserpine and Midas • Mary Shelley

... Boeotian. But here we must guard ourselves against a misapprehension. We moderns look askance at the writer who borrows without acknowledgment the thoughts and phrases of his forerunners, but the Roman critics of the Augustan Age looked at the matter from a different point of view. They regarded the Greeks as having set the standard of the highest possible achievement in literature, and believed that it should be the aim ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil

... though in three different degrees of nearness to the writer's own personal experience, laborious, formal, self-suppressing. This was for the instruction of the public; and part of it has, perhaps, found its way into the Augustan Histories. But it was for the especial guidance of his son Commodus that he had permitted himself to break out, here [46] and there, into reflections upon what was passing, into conversations with the reader. ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two • Walter Horatio Pater

... Newport—my Newport, the Public Garden of Boston, alias Hub-opolis—which you, poor things! belonging to the 'higher orders' and living on Arlington, Berkely, Clarendon, and the Duke of Devonshire streets, never have a chance to see in its Augustan pomp and glory. In fact, till this summer, its 'pomp and glory' were quite concealed by dust and ashes; but now, thanks to the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... artistic reputation of Mr. Burne Jones, to rebuke the philosophy of Mr. Pater, and to hint that the entrance-hall of the Grosvenor Gallery is that "by-way" with which Bunyan has made us familiar. In the changes of things our admiration of the Augustan age of our literature, the age of Addison and Steele, of Marlborough and Aldrich, has become a sort of reproach. It may be that our modern preachers know but little of that which they traduce. At all ...
— Oxford • Andrew Lang

... Society entitles the subscriber to six publications issued each year. The annual membership fee is $2.50. Address subscriptions and communications to the Augustan Reprint Society, in care of ...
— Representation of the Impiety and Immorality of the English Stage (1704); Some Thoughts Concerning the Stage in a Letter to a Lady (1704) • Anonymous

... dwellers at Hampton Court breathed their last in air supposed so life-giving by Wolsey when he made it his seat. They loved it and enjoyed it, and in Queen Anne's time, when under a dull sovereign the civility of England brightened to Augustan splendor, the deep-rooted stem of English poetry burst there into the most exquisite artificial flower which it ever bore; for it was at Hampton Court that the fact occurred, which the fancy of the poet fanned to a bloom, as lasting as if it were rouge, in ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells

... the jolly Dean Who, in "Augustan" times, Made merriment for fat and lean In jocund prose and rhymes! Ah, but he drove a pranksome quill! With quips he wove a spell; His creed—he cried it with a will— Was ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VIII (of X) • Various

... offering his arm to Miss Travers,—"supper is a word truly interesting, truly poetical. It associates itself with the entertainments of the ancients, with the Augustan age, with Horace and Maecenas; with the only elegant but too fleeting period of the modern world; with the nobles and wits of Paris, when Paris had wits and nobles; with Moliere and the warm-hearted Duke who is said to have been the original of Moliere's Misanthrope; with Madame ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... The Augustan Reprint Society is a non-profit, scholarly organization, run without overhead expense. By careful management it is able to offer at least six publications each year at the unusually low membership fee of $2.50 per year in the United States and ...
— De Carmine Pastorali (1684) • Rene Rapin

... not intended for a portrait of Cicero on that occasion, exactly describes his position and his success. We have a fragment of Cornelius Nepos, the biographer of the Augustan age, declaring that at Cicero's death men had to doubt whether literature or the Republic had lost the most.[9] Livy declared of him only, that he would be the best writer of Latin prose who was most like to Cicero.[10] Velleius Paterculus, who wrote in the time of Tiberius, ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope

... that to be a poet was not only to be good society, but almost to be good family. If one names over the men who gave Boston her supremacy in literature during that Unitarian harvest-time of the old Puritanic seed-time which was her Augustan age, one names the people who were and who had been socially first in the city ever since the self-exile of the Tories at the time of the Revolution. To say Prescott, Motley, Parkman, Lowell, Norton, Higginson, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... in this, I beseech your highness satisfy me also in another matter, and bear with me though I be somewhat busy, for I mean it for the best. I have many times heard of men of good judgement and friends to this cause, that as the emperor's majesty, being in disposition of the Augustan confession, hath been forced in these great wars of the Turk to temporise in respect of Christendom; so your highness, being of his mind inwardly, hath also upon good policy forborne to discover yourself until you might see some end of your ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin

... the uncomely, as well as the comely parts of nature has been made familiar by Wordsworth, but it was new in the time of Cowper. Let us compare a landscape painted by Pope in his Windsor forest, with the lines just quoted, and we shall see the difference between the art of Cowper, and that of the Augustan age. ...
— Cowper • Goldwin Smith

... name could have given better assurance of good intentions and upright conduct than that of Mr. Ewing. He was a man of lofty character, of great eminence in his profession of the law, and with wide and varied experience in public life. He had held high rank as a Senator in the Augustan period of the Senate's learning and eloquence, and he had been one of the ablest members of the distinguished Cabinets organized by the only two Presidents elected by the Whig Party. He had reached the ripe age of seventy-eight years, but still in complete possession of all ...
— History of the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson, • Edumud G. Ross

... final vowel would hardly be conceivable at a time when there existed case-terminations. Still this dropping of the vowel is very common, in late historical times, in Latin, for instance, and other Italian dialects, where it causes frequent confusion and heteroclitism.[32] Thus the Augustan innocua was shortened in common pronunciation to innoca, and this dwindles down in Christian inscriptions to innox. In Greek, too, diaktoros is older than diaktr; ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller

... masterful, Louis the Fourteenth ruled as King of France for seventy-two years—the most powerful monarch in Christendom. Handsome in person, majestic in bearing, dignified, lavish, and proud; ruling France in one of the most splendid periods of its history—a period styled "the Augustan age" of France; flattered, feared, and absolutely obeyed, one would think, boys and girls, that so powerful a monarch must have been a happy man. But he was not. He lived to see children and grandchildren ...
— Historic Boys - Their Endeavours, Their Achievements, and Their Times • Elbridge Streeter Brooks

... in what case te incolumi is; and, if in the ablative absolute, can any one bring a parallel construction from the writers of the Augustan age, where the law of apposition appears to be so ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 24. Saturday, April 13. 1850 • Various

... Cibber, one of the earliest of the dramatic autobiographers, is also one of the most amusing. He flourished in wig and embroidery, player, poet, and manager, during the Augustan age of Queen Anne, somewhat earlier and somewhat later. A most egregious fop, according to all accounts, he was, but a very pleasant one notwithstanding, as your fop of parts is apt to be. Pope gained but little in the warfare he waged with him, for this plain reason—that ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins

... city of Rome at the beginning of the Augustan age was not less than half a million of people, and probably exceeded this number. There was no middle class, a comparatively small number of gentry, a very numerous plebs or populace, and many slaves. The Emperor ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott

... certainly not above mediocrity—not even that gilded mediocrity of which Horace speaks, with a country house at Tibur and Montmorency, and which results from a pension of thirty thousand sestercia from the Augustan treasury, or a government annuity of six thousand francs—but that poor and miserable mediocrity which only provides from day to day, and which is only prevented from becoming ...
— The Conspirators - The Chevalier d'Harmental • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)

... eighteenth century, the big men, Swift, Pope, and Addison, having passed away, the Augustan age of English literature seemed exhausted. It was a time of intellectual dyspepsia; every one was much too fond of ruins; people built sham ruins on their estates. Rich men, who could afford the luxury, kept a dilapidated hermit in ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross

... this bit, famous for being one of the places in Virgil which goes to prove that the Sibylline books (to which the Augustan poets had easy access) quoted Isaiah's prophecies of Christ and the Millennium. It will be considered that my public versifying was quite extempore, as in fact is common with me. For other college memories in the literary line, I may just mention certain brochures or parodies, initialed ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper

... claimed that Dacier's Aristotle introduced any new critical theories into England. Actually it provides material for little more than an extended footnote on the history of criticism in the Augustan period. Dacier survived as an influence only so long as did a respect for the rules; and he is remembered today merely as one of the historically important interpreters—or misinterpreters—of the Poetics.[4] ...
— The Preface to Aristotle's Art of Poetry • Andre Dacier

... The Augustan forum, built by Augustus Caesar, containing statues in the two porticos, on each side of the main building. In one were all the Latin kings, beginning with AEneas: in the other all the Roman kings, beginning with Romulus, and most of the eminent persons in the commonwealth, and Augustus ...
— Roman Antiquities, and Ancient Mythology - For Classical Schools (2nd ed) • Charles K. Dillaway

... "mechanick" as well as the fine arts. The work is, in fact, essentially a pamphlet on education. The author's main concern is training, and study, and conscious endeavor. Naturally enough, his highest praise—even where poetry is in question—is reserved for those solid Augustan virtues of "judgment" and ...
— 'Of Genius', in The Occasional Paper, and Preface to The Creation • Aaron Hill

... we gain most from Strabo, in the Augustan age, who tells what earlier and greater geographers than himself had already discovered about our island; Pliny the Elder, who, in the next century, found the ethnology and botany of Britain so valuable for his 'Natural History'; Ptolemy, a generation ...
— Early Britain—Roman Britain • Edward Conybeare

... diffidence, not need, From which it rose; had bards but truly known That strength, which is most properly their own, 360 Without a lord, unpropp'd they might have stood, And overtopp'd those giants of the wood. But why, when present times my care engage, Must I go back to the Augustan age? Why, anxious for the living, am I led Into the mansions of the ancient dead? Can they find patrons nowhere but at Rome, And must I seek Maecenas in the tomb? Name but a Wingate, twenty fools of note Start ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill

... says I, "is a really classical insect, and breathes of Virgil and the Augustan age,—and then she is a domestic, tranquil, placid creature. How beautiful the murmuring of a hive near our honeysuckle of a calm, summer evening! Then they are tranquilly and peacefully amassing for us their stores of sweetness, while they lull us with ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... says that, before the time of Prometheus, mankind were exempt from suffering; that they enjoyed a vigorous youth, and that death, when at length it came, approached like sleep, and gently closed their eyes. Again, so general was this opinion that Horace, a poet of the Augustan age, writes:— ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley

... intersection of the Calle del Condestable and the Calle de la Triperia, several gentlemen who, gracefully enveloped in their cloaks, stood there like sentinels, watching the people as they passed by. If the weather was fine, those shining lights of the Urbs Augustan culture bent their steps, still enveloped in the indispensable cloak, toward the promenade called the Paseo de las Descalzas, which was formed by a double row of consumptive-looking elms and some withered bushes of broom. There ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos

... that during those centuries of turmoil the Chinese were not wholly engrossed with war and rapine. The T'ang dynasty is conspicuously the Augustan Age. Literature reappears in a more perfect form than under the preceding reigns. The prose writers of that period are to the present day studied as models of composition, which cannot be affirmed of the writers of any earlier epoch. Poetry, too, shone forth with ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin

... it was determined that we should sail to Italy, they delivered Paul and certain other prisoners to a centurion named Julius, of the Augustan band. (2)And entering into a ship of Adramyttium, about to sail along the coasts of Asia, we put to sea, Aristarchus, a Macedonian of Thessalonica, being with us. (3)And on the second day we landed at Sidon. And Julius treated Paul humanely, and permitted him to go to his friends and receive their ...
— The New Testament of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. • Various

... in religious and mental activity. Endeavouring to judge our own period by this standard, and making a swift survey of its achievements in literature, we do not find it apparently inferior to the splendours of "great Elizabeth" or of the Augustan age of Anne. Our fifth Queen-regnant, whose reign, longer than that of any of her four predecessors, is also happier than that of the greatest among them, can reckon among her subjects an even larger number of men eminent in all departments of knowledge, though perhaps we cannot boast ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling

... reputation as an English Scholar—could not quote Chaucer so as to make his lines scan. The Rowley Poems and Percy's Reliques mark the beginning of that renascence of our older poetry so conspicuous in the time of Lamb and Hazlitt. Before this epoch was the Augustan age, much too well satisfied with its own literature to concern ...
— The Rowley Poems • Thomas Chatterton

... reign of Walpole had not yet begun. There was a great outburst of intellectual activity and aesthetic energy. The amazing discoveries of Newton seemed to open out boundless possibilities of speculation; and in the meantime the great nobles were building palaces and reviving the magnificence of the Augustan Age, while men of letters filled the offices of State. Never, perhaps, before or since, has England been so thoroughly English; never have the national qualities of solidity and sense, independence of judgment and idiosyncrasy of temperament, received a more ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey

... human vows, how frail they be! Fame brought Carlisle unto his view, And all amazed, he thought to see The Augustan age anew. Fill'd with wild rapture, up he rose, No more he ponders on the woes Which erst he felt that forward goes, Regrets he'd sunk in impotence, And hails the ideal day of ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White

... protect themselves, or even to provide food. Sicily and Africa supplied the Roman people with bread, long before the empire had become feeble, and even at the very time when it is reckoned to have been in its greatest splendour in the Augustan age. {35} The cause of its decline was fixed beyond the power of human nature to counteract: it began by unnerving the human character, and therefore its progress was accelerated and ...
— An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations. • William Playfair

... succeeding Roman writers did not so, because Greek had then become the fashionable, universal language. They did not translate, but they paraphrased; the ideas remaining the same, their dress different. Hence the attention of the poets of the Augustan age was principally confined to the happy selection of the most appropriate words and elaborate phrases; and hence arises ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth

... is not without a certain barbaric splendour; but it discovers, as might be expected, no skill in the more refined graces of the Augustan age. The verse he quoted to Thomas Warton as his favourite, from the translation of ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary

... no longer room to build in rows where the poor lived, they put the houses on top of one another. That is the first chapter of the story of the tenement everywhere. Gibbon quotes the architect Vitruvius, who lived in the Augustan age, as complaining of "the common though inconvenient practice of raising houses to a considerable height in the air. But the loftiness of the buildings, which often consisted of hasty work and insufficient ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis



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